SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • An epic, authoritative, gripping account of the years when a new wave of revolutionaries seized the skies and the streets to hold the world for ransomIn the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international...

A human history of one of the planet's most iconic lakes, and the civilizations that surrounded its shores The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are...

This first truly global history of the suppression of piracy links maritime raiding to empire building in the nineteenth century In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with...

How did a time-keeping device affect the growth of crafts guilds and the scientific research that led to the Industrial Revolution? Clocks and Culture is a brief history of the changes wrought by and on Europe over four hundred years due to technological...

Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, examines the legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa, which was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. The...

The French historian takes an anti-ethnocentric look at the broad, continuing sweep of the history of civilization since the eighth century. By the author of The Structures of Everyday Life.

For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the Americas, from the United States and the Caribbean to Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom. For the first time, their dramatic stories are gathered in one sweeping narrative that...

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of...

"What place do images hold among other kinds of historical evidence? In Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images As Historical Evidence, Peter Burke reviews graphics, photographs, films and other media from many countries and periods and examines their...

One of the major intellectual debates inside and outside the historical profession at the beginning of the new century concerns the status of accounts of the past. Can historians tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Do they discover...

This unprecedented book by one of Britain's most admired historians describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of history has had in the Western world over the past 2,500 years. Treating the practice of history not as an isolated...